The Cultural History Of Flab

Peter Paul Rubens' "The Three Graces" (1639) shows women of a more typical size than those just two centuries later.

Museo del Prado, Madrid

We crave its taste but not its look. What’s up with our love-hate relationship with fat?

Friday on Up to Date we unravel the twisted history of flab. From a sign of richness to a signal of rot and ruin, society’s interpretation of fat has included racism, status, beauty and health. We can’t live without it, but have we learned how to live with it?

Steve Kraske talks with University of Kansas history professor Christopher Forth about the cultural history of flab.

Christopher Forth is Professor of History and holds the Howard Chair of Humanities & Western Civilization as well as a Courtesy Professorship in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research and teaching interests revolve around the cultural history of gender, sexuality, the body, and the senses (with an emphasis on modern France, Britain and America) as well as European intellectual and cultural history. Forth is the author or editor of eight books, including The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (2004), Masculinity in the Modern West (2008), and the co-edited volumes French Masculinities (2007) and Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France (2010). Co-director of the Hall Center “Modernities” seminar, Forth taught for ten years at the Australian National University before taking up his current position at KU in 2008. He is an affiliate of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland (Australia).